She perfectly recreates the idioms and dialects of a certain sort of Manchester, and it was un-put-downable in a slightly addictive, confessional way.

It is an uphill task capturing the true spirit of the original, not missing out on the nuances and finer points of the dialect and the local idiom, or for that matter, the tenor and authentic flavour of the literary work in question.

There are southern and northern dialects, each having three regional idioms.

Origin

This goes back to Greek idiōma ‘private or peculiar phraseology’, from idiousthai ‘make one's own’ from Greek idios ‘own, private’. Idiosyncrasy (early 17th century) is from idios combined with sun ‘with’ and krasis ‘mixture’, and originally meant ‘physical constitution peculiar to an individual’.